- Tashi Wada's experimental compositions capture our current age, highlighting the beauty that can be found in an unstable world.
- The rubber pencil trick is simple: hold one tip of a pencil with your thumb and forefinger, wiggle it gently up and down, and the pencil appears to wobble. The pencil, of course, isn't actually malleable. The illusion is possible because the human eye and brain can't process the movement in real time. Los Angeles-based composer Tashi Wada, son of the Fluxus artist Yoshi Wada, is deeply familiar with this particular magic. In his hands, concrete musical elements become pliable: drums bend time more than keep it, and staccato harpsichord notes congeal in an undulating mass. Even pitches, supposedly exact measurements of the frequency of vibration, don't hold steadily in one place. Like the wavering pencil, Wada's work presents the idea that reality may not be as rigid as it seems.
It's been nearly six years since the release of Wada's last album, Nue. That towering, dissonant entry in RVNG Intl.'s FRKWYS series joined Wada and his father with a crew of collaborators that included Fluxus artist Simone Forti and LA musicians such as Cole M.G.N., Julia Holter and Corey Fogel. During that period, Wada experienced a profound amount of upheaval, including the death of his father and the birth of his daughter. All the while, the world around him has been swaying mightily on its axis: the threat of the global pandemic, an alarming rise of fascism and our drastically changing climate. It's a lot to try and make sense of. Wada's new record, What Is Not Strange?, named after a poem by American Surrealist writer Philip Lamantia, speculates that the stabilising centre we crave as humans may not exist.
This outsized idea makes for some enchanting, otherworldly music that can be difficult to parse at times. What Is Not Strange? floats between brooding ambient, stately neoclassical and cosmic free jazz. The ensemble features celestial vocals from Julia Holter (who is also Wada's partner), muscular percussion from Corey Fogel and textural strings and bass from Ezra Buchla and Devin Hoff, respectively. Together, the musicians operate like a single organism, playing with a deep, almost telepathic focus. Wada underpins most of his compositions with thick drones, giving the songs the feeling of being grounded in a specific mode—but even that sense of stability tends to vanish after a while.
Wada's halting, tentative arrangement of "Asleep to the World" works as a guide for the entire record. A low synthesiser tone gradually unfurls through a low-pass filter, as twinkling higher harmonics play around its edges. As Wada's synth and Fogel's splashing cymbals fade away, Holter's vocals, resembling the sacred choral work of The Hilliard Ensemble's Perotin recordings, glide alongside the rumble and then quietly recede. Unexpected hushes silo each of the song's small movements from the others, creating a disorienting, dreamlike atmosphere.
What Is Not Strange?'s many wayward instruments constantly dither in and out of time or tune, giving the album a hefty, low-bellied sway. The droning chord that carries "Under the Earth" slowly peels away from itself, notes curling away from the root like a fraying string. On "Revealed Night," sirens spiral almost inaudibly against a cloud of feedback and muffled noise. Near the end of "Plume," Terry Riley-esque keyboard solos slither around Holter's layered, atonal singing and Fogel's drumming, everything whirling together into a beautiful, Wayne Shorter-esque cacophony.
At every turn, Wada's arrangements point towards a hook or focal point they never reach, but they don't collapse along the way, either. Each swirl of tone and texture has its own gravitational pull. Instruments constantly supplant one another as a composition's centre; a synth may establish a particular key only to be replaced by dulcet singing, all of which gets overtaken by a wash of percussion. No one element seems more important than another. The fleeting moment, Wada seems to suggest, is perhaps more important than the general whole, and the art of experiencing life should probably take precedence over the search for its meaning.
トラックリスト01. What Is Not Strange?
02. Grand Trine
03. Revealed Night
04. Asleep To The World
05. Flame of Perfect Form
06. Under the Earth
07. Subaru
08. Time of Birds
09. Calling
10. Plume
11. This World's Beauty